Goblin Moon (32 page)

“Miss Elsie’s medication?” said Skelbrooke.

“I have carried it with me everywhere, these last
three days,” said Sera, fastening her gaze on the little
star-shaped patch on his left cheek, rather than look him directly
in the eye. “As I told you earlier in the week, when you were so
obliging as to deliver Jedidiah’s letter, the bottle disappeared
after Count Xebo’s ball, though I had reason to suppose Elsie
continued to take the medication. It appears now that Elsie did not
hide the bottle—which, to be sure, seemed like very odd behavior on
her part—but had turned the medicine over to her mother for
safekeeping. It was only by good fortune that I discovered the
bottle in Cousin Clothilde’s sitting room when no one else was
there.

“I was beginning to fear,” she added, “that I would
not have the opportunity to give you this, before we leave for
Zar-Wildungen.”

Lord Skelbrooke put down his cup of chocolate. “I beg
your pardon, I knew nothing of this. To Zar-Wildungen, you say? You
will be traveling with the Duchess to her country house?”

“With the Duchess, yes,” said Sera, in some
confusion. “I hoped—that is—are you not also to be a member of the
party?”

“No,” said Skelbrooke. “I was not invited. I had
assumed the Duke’s poor health was the reason for her visit. And
now I discover she is taking a party with her . . .”

He made a steeple of his hands, rested his chin on
the tips of his fingers. “I begin to fear that I have fallen from
favor.”

He spoke the words lightly, but a frown creased his
forehead, and the grey eyes went dark as if in pain.
He does care for her. She has hurt him deeply,
Sera
thought, with a sinking sensation.
It is the
Duchess he loves, and not the woman he mentioned at Count Xebo’s
ball.

“Miss Vorder,” said his lordship, continuing to
frown. “I wonder if this journey is really advisable? We are not,
after all, entirely certain as to the state of your cousin’s
health.”

“The decision was not mine to make,” said Sera.
“Elsie and her mother are both determined that she should go. I
tried to dissuade her, but she would not listen. All that remained
for
me
was to decide whether I should
accompany Elsie or not. Naturally, I could not allow her to make
the journey without me.”

Skelbrooke unfolded his hands. “In that case, there
is nothing more to be said.” He picked up the vial containing
Elsie’s medication and slipped it into a pocket. “I shall deliver
this to my friend the apothecary on the morrow, but we can hardly
expect to learn anything immediately.”

He picked up his cup, took another sip of chocolate.
“If I do learn anything of particular interest, I shall write to
you at once. But perhaps—perhaps, as the letter will pass through
so many hands—With your permission, Miss Vorder, I shall write to
you under an assumed name, the name of some friend, unknown to the
Duchess.”

But Sera did not like this suggestion at all. Surely,
she thought, there was something dishonorable about staying in the
Duchess’s house and accepting clandestine messages from the
Duchess’s lover, whether he currently stood high in her favor or
not. And what an odd, unpredictable man Lord Skelbrooke was! Only a
moment ago, it had seemed that he was totally devoted to the
Duchess—a few weeks past, he had spoken wistfully of another
woman—and now he seemed bent on initiating an intrigue (no matter
how unromantic) with Sera herself.

“Lord Skelbrooke,” she said aloud. “I think that I
should tell you that I despise subterfuge.”

“Who could know you and believe otherwise?” said
Skelbrooke. He reached into a waistcoat pocket and brought out a
gilded snuffbox. “But if I may say so, you have already been guilty
of an innocent deception, when you secretly obtained a sample of
Elsie’s medicine.”

Sera felt herself blushing, remembering other actions
she had taken in order to circumvent Cousin Clothilde.

“For your cousin’s sake,” said Lord Skelbrooke, “I
beg you to accept my word that concealment of my part in this
matter is absolutely necessary.”

Sera knotted the drawstrings on her reticule. She was
hardly in a position to impose conditions. “Very well, Lord
Skelbrooke. I shall expect a letter, ostensibly from this friend of
yours. What name shall I look for?”

Lord Skelbrooke shook back a lace ruffle, dropped a
pinch of snuff on the back of his wrist. “Carstares,” he said, over
his hand. He inhaled, and sneezed delicately. “I shall write to you
under the name of Robin Carstares.”

Chapter
26

In which Gottfried Jenk grows discouraged.

The storm continued through the night, passing on in
the early morning. The cobbles were still wet when Jenk opened the
shutters in his attic sitting room and looked down the street.
Water dripped from the eaves of the slope-roofed old houses and
shops.

Near the foot of the hill, a familiar
stoop-shouldered form began the short climb. He cut an odd
hobgoblin sort of figure these days, did Caleb Braun, his back so
crooked and his movements so stiff, and his clothes all mismatched
bits and pieces. Very fine he was as to his striped satin
waistcoat, brass shoe buckles, and shiny new tricorn; very shabby
as to his faded blue coat and scarlet breeches, his patched
stockings, and the knotted kerchief he wore in place of a
neckcloth. Jed had provided him with a new suit of clothes, had
outfitted him properly from head to toe, but Caleb steadfastly
refused to wear everything at once, preferring to eke out his new
wardrobe two or three pieces at a time.

Jenk drew in his head. He put on his snuff-colored
coat and sidled down the stairs to the bookshop. He unlocked the
door and opened it just as Caleb arrived, and stood on the
threshold, a figure nearly as bent as Caleb himself, impatiently
waving his henchman inside.

“You have interrupted my breakfast. There was no need
for you to come so early. I told you—did I not?—that I did not
intend to open the shop before mid-morning.”

“Aye, you told me,” said Caleb, limping in through
the door. “But I had a hankering for to see her. Now, if I had a
set of keys: one for the bookshop and one for the laboratory, it
would set my mind at rest, Gottfried, it would ease my heart. I
can’t bear to be locked away from her, you know that.”

Yes, Jenk knew that. These last few weeks had wrought
a terrible change in Caleb. His skin was grey and hung loose on his
bones; his eyes had a hollow, sunken look. Jenk gave him a weary
little pat on the shoulder as he passed. But when he spoke, the
bookseller’s voice was stern.

“I begin to regret that I ever yielded to your pleas,
that I ever allowed you to play so important a role in creating the
little creature. This obsession you have developed: I fear it is
not a healthy one, my old friend. “

“That may be,” said Caleb, bristling up. “But who are
you to say so? Least I got my heart set on something I can
see.”

“I cannot deny it,” said Jenk, with a heavy sigh. “If
you are obsessed with the growing homunculus, am I not equally
obsessed by my search for the Stone?”

He made a fumbling search of his coat pockets, at
last produced the key to the room at the back. “I do not suppose
there is any use asking you to join me upstairs? Very well, then. I
shall meet you in the laboratory, very shortly. We have much to
discuss, Caleb. It is time that we took some thought for the
future.”

Only the stubby candle incubating the crystal egg and
a pale silvery glow issuing from the vessel itself illuminated the
inner room. Caleb limped across the laboratory and peered eagerly
into the clouded fluid.

The tiny creature at the center of the egg had not
shifted position since the night before; she was still huddled in a
tight little ball, with her knees drawn up to her narrow chest and
her arms wrapped around her legs. But her pale green eyes were wide
open, and her gaze curiously intent.

Caleb pulled up a stool and sat down, with his elbows
on the table, and his face close to the crystal egg. Only when Jenk
came into the room, almost an hour later, did he shift his
position, slowly and stiffly.

“She’s awake, Gottfried. Just you come here and look
at her. She’s awake again, and staring at me with them big tragic
eyes.”

Jenk hardly spared a glance; he was too occupied
lighting the lanthorn suspended from the ceiling. “I see that her
eyes are open, but whether she is awake and conscious remains to be
seen . . . I believe that we allowed ourselves to be fooled by an
appearance
of intelligence in the first
one.” He closed the glass door of the lanthorn. “In any case, she
will soon go dormant again.”

Caleb glanced back over his shoulder. “She were awake
for a long time yesterday, moving about. She beat her tiny little
fists against the glass, like she wanted out. I don’t reckon she’s
happy in there no more.”

“Nonsense,” said Jenk. “Her movements are random; you
deceive yourself if you attach any meaning to them. And your
‘long time,’
as I recall, was not above
twenty minutes—if as much. Then she closed her eyes, and the gills
on the side of her neck ceased to flutter. She immediately lost
color, as though her heart had ceased to beat and circulate her
blood. We have seen this happen a dozen times—she is still more
dead than alive.”

Caleb shifted impatiently on his stool. “She’s bigger
nor the other one was . . . bigger and livelier. She wants to get
born, I know she does.”

“Nonsense,” Jenk repeated, moving toward the other
table. “She will lose whatever degree of animation she has attained
if we decant her too soon—just as the first one did. We must not
allow our impatience (nor our misplaced compassion) to get the
better of us a second time. We must wait another three or four
days.”

Jenk lifted the lid of the coffin. Even after so many
seasons it still came as a shock to him, each time that he looked
inside. The perfect preservation of the body, the lifelike color
beneath the clear, waxy skin, the half-smile on the face of the
sorcerer—as though he were only sleeping, and his dreams were
sweet.

Jenk wondered (as he had wondered so many times
before): if he gathered the courage to cut the threads that
stitched the eyelids closed—would the eyes open—would the magician
awake? Almost, Jenk believed that he would, yet he feared to make
the experiment, to tamper with the body, lest even so tiny an
alteration cause the preservation spell to fail, the corpse to
disintegrate.

He turned away from the coffin, shuffled across the
room, and opened the iron door of the furnace. He inspected the
glass vessel he had been gently heating in a bed of hot sand for
four and twenty days now. An oily black sediment was still forming
on the walls of the flask, but otherwise there had been no
change.

With a shaking hand, Jenk placed the vessel back in
its bed of sand. He had followed the formula so carefully, and the
early results had been encouraging—He knew that the process was
necessarily a slow one . . . yet he was beginning to wonder whether
it was time to abandon this attempt and begin anew.

He put a hand to his chest, felt the slow, painful
thud of his heartbeat, a buzzing and rattling in his lungs. Time,
time was the very thing that he lacked. Indeed, with every passing
day, he grew more acutely conscious of his own mortality.

“It ain’t going well,” said Caleb.

“No,” said Jenk. “I believe that this attempt has
failed, also.”

Caleb waved his hand dismissively. “What does it
matter, then? Ain’t we done a great thing in creating the
homunculus? Seems to me there was a time that would’ve been glory
enough and more than enough for you.”

But Jenk shook his head. It was not enough, it was
not nearly enough. Yes, the creation of the living homunculus must
gain him some measure of fame, it had already served a useful
purpose in attracting the interest and the patronage of the Duke.
But it was the stone Seramarias and nothing less that would bring
Jenk all the wealth and all the power that he craved.

“I must begin again,” said Jenk, sinking wearily down
on a stool beside the copper still. “It will be very expensive,
very time-consuming, but I must begin again. And I am weary, Caleb
. . . I am most unutterably weary.

“It has been difficult, has it not?” he asked, with a
heartfelt sigh. “Maintaining the illusion—for Sera’s sake and for
Jed’s—that it is still the book trade that principally occupies us.
But now that Sera is leaving town (not to return for so many long
weeks), now that Jedidiah’s new duties, his new friends, keep him
so thoroughly occupied, I do not see why we should not close the
bookshop and take an extended holiday, you and I.”

“Aye.” Caleb gave a tug at his kerchief, as though he
found it tight around his throat. “It’s been a burden on my
conscience, lying and deceiving the lad that way that I been. Less
need for that now, when he don’t have time to ask so many
questions—and all for his own good, I keep telling myself—but
sometimes it troubles me.”

“As I am similarly troubled,” said Jenk. “Yet I am
convinced that we act for the best in keeping the pair of them as
innocent as possible. Less worry for them now, less chance of
disappointment later.

“But it has occurred to me, Caleb, that when we do
decant the homunculus, someone must be on hand to care for her at
all hours.”

Caleb took a deep breath and released it slowly.
“That case, I’ll have to move in, here at the bookshop.”

“Yes,” said Jenk. “I had already considered that. You
may have Sera’s old room. Tell Jedidiah . . . tell him whatever
story he is most likely to believe. That I am ill—or that you are.
You must be entirely convincing, he must not suspect a thing, lest
he communicate his concern to those new friends of his.”